Another Failed Christian Attempt To Understand Marx

Fortunately, this is our last review of Ralph Drollinger's work. The article for today's review is his article comparing capitalism with communism (click here). Unfortunately, Drollinger's shows no real understanding of Marx and thus he is comparing capitalism with a straw man. In addition, it seems that Drollinger is blind to full effects of the economic system he loves.

First, let's take a look at Drollinger's understanding of communism, or really Marxism. Drollinger reduces Marxism to the abolishing of private property without understanding Marx's most basic concern and belief. Drollinger reduces Marxism, which he calls communism, to the abolishing of private property with the state being the owner of everything. To establish his case, Drollinger quotes from the Communist Manifesto (click here for the Manifesto and click the link for part II):

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: the abolition of private property.

There is no doubt that Marx wrote those words. But what was Marx's concern in coming to that conclusion? We can discover that by reading the parts of the Manifesto that both precede and follow that famous line by Marx. Below are some of the lines that are also part of the Manifesto:

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few...

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character...

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at...

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

We should first note that Marx was speaking to the conditions of his time. So we may not see today all that he saw back then. And the conditions back then were that private property was a privilege for the bourgeoisie, not the workers. So what we see in Marx is not an attack on the private property of all, but of the bourgeoisie private property because that property gave the the bourgeoisie social power that enabled them to exploit the workers. Thus, by eliminating property and putting it in the hands of the state, the bourgeoisie has lost its power.

But does that mean that state ownership of all private property is what Marxism is about? The answer is below:

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat…

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

What is clear from above is that Marx's first concern is not that of redistributing wealth, but of redistributing power. And that redistribution of power is not to the state per se, but to the workers, the proletariat. And, according to Marx, with that redistribution of power comes the elimination of not just bourgeoisie private property, but of divisions caused by nationalism.

I want to be clear here, I am not defending all that Marx wrote. I disagree with his utopianism, his idealism about the 'proletariat dictatorship' and so forth. But if we step back to a greater abstraction, what Marx said back then is a partial remedy for today's Neoliberal Capitalism. That without an all-or-nothing changing of the guard, we need to redistribute power, both at work and in our political system, to the workers and other stakeholder groups in our economy. So that these other groups share power with the owners, the bourgeoisie of our time. That ownership  by wealth does not give one the kind of rights that Drollinger seems to think exist.

Thus, Drollinger never really addresses what Marx and the Communist Manifesto was about. Drollinger should read Marx's On The Jewish Question. For in that work, Marx states that some of the states in the United States have accomplished the ideal of abolishing private property when they allow non landowners to vote and run for office because that allows for the possibility that such people could pass legislation that could control landowners (click here for that work).

We should note that like Capitalism, Socialism is not a monolith. There are different forms of both. The form of Capitalism which our nation employs today, Neoliberal Capitalism, is not the form it practiced immediately after WW II, the Bretton-Woods system. The latter allowed for more government control and intervention into the economy than the former. The former is, in spirit at least, follows the self-centered mindset of Ayn Rand's philosophy. And while the Bretton-Woods system saw egalitarian growth for all economic classes, the Neoliberal Capitalism has, for the most part, been the major cause for a decades long growth in wealth disparity--which has also produced a growth in political power disparity in favor of those in the upper economic classes. And that political power disparity is to the extent that some are now questioning whether America is a democracy or an oligarchy (click here and there).

The bourgeoisie of Marx's day has been replaced by the wealthy shareholders of today. For before the pandemic, which has seemed to alert people of our interdependencies, wealthy shareholders have been the absentee landlords of our financial system. They are constantly buying and selling stocks with the single intent of maximizing their personal profits without thought of what they could contribute to the other stakeholders of the company. And though things are not as bad for all workers as they were in Marx's day, many who work for publicly owned companies, both white and blue collar employees,  know that they are disposable objects of profit for the welfare of the shareholders.

There isn't enough time to fully address the rest of Drollinger's article. Part of that is because he demonstrates an ignorance of what Marx was about and what he meant by the abolition of private property. It is also apparent that Drollinger doesn't see the full impact of the economic system he so enthusiastically  thinks is strongly supported by the Scriptures. If only Drollinger would understand Marx's most basic concern and address it with how he things the Scriptures should apply, then he could have written something worth reading. But as it stands now, it seems that Drollinger has found a way to use the Bible to sanctify the economic system he grew up in. And such is a common practice that most often leads to serious errors.









 


References

1. https://capmin.org/government-and-economics-capitalism-vs-communism/